The article attempts to consider issues related to the presence of various language varieties in Croatian literature – general/standard (native and foreign), regional (dialects, regiolects), social (sociolects). Focusing primarily on artistic narrative prose, the author tries to show how the heritage of centuries‑old multilingualism in the culture of Croatia translated into various stylistic phenomena, how it evolves and what consequences it may have not only for the language itself, but also for cultural phenomena. Thanks to this approach, an attempt is made to highlight the circumstances related to the choice of the Shtokavian dialect as the literary language in the 19th century.